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A month into the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, some commentators began to wonder out loud whether the US Government ought to take over for BP in stemming the leak. As frustrated as those commentators were at BP–after all, the oil company had shirked safety procedures and lied about having the technology to manage such a spill–they had to admit that the US Government did not have the technical expertise to divert or shut off the oil.  For better or worse, we had to rely on BP in capping the leaks.

Having to rely on the culprit to solve the problem and clean up the mess sounds a bit like how the financial crisis of 2008 was managed.  In other words, we have managed to become dependent on firms such as Goldman Sachs and BP even where they are the culprits.  To be sure, government is an authority or umpire in society, not a producer.  To treat government as a business evinces a category mistake of sorts. Were it to operate as a producer, there would be a conflict of interest in its governmental capacity because it would be inclined to favor itself even as its umpire function requires having an even hand. It is also a cateogory mistake to treat a business as having a governmental capacity.  Hence, we don’t want the banking or oil lobby running Congress.

Rather than become an oil company, the executive branch of the US Government ought to concentrate on better organizing itself in its umpire capacity. In particular, the Department of Homeland Security (i.e., the Coast Guard), the Energy Dept, and the Interior Department each had a ball in play as the oil spill unfolded. Hence the umpire could not speak with one voice, as the US President must rely on someone to handle the day to day umpiring.  We couldn’t very well have the President living on the Lousiana coast as the oil leaked.  Having too many cooks in the kitchen makes for confusion. The relevance of the Interior Department alone is debatable, as the spill did not take place in the interior. Even so, the administrators were falling over each other in positioning themselves. Advocating that the government take over from BP would only multiply the harmful effects from the confusion that is immanent in the branch’s structure.  I would even contend, moreover, that the US President should concentrate on governmental domains in which the several states cannot act (even if some won’t!), rather than wading into every problem.

In short, the US Government can’t do it all, hence it shouldn’t try. Where it is the only umpire in town, such as out in the Gulf, it should concentrate on being a good umpire. This includes not only simplifying its own organization (in the exec branch), but also keeping itself from being unduly influenced by business so it can be an effective umpire.  Allowing Wall Street to have influence over the writing of financial regulation (or oil companies in MMS) not only compromises the government’s umpire function, it also permits sordid companies to exist, and thus to potentially be relied upon in stopping the leaks whether in the financial world or in the Gulf.  The US Government ought to concentrate its power so it can be a viable umpire, rather than allowing itself to become a confused sieve.

“In a sense, Europe seemed to be living down to expectations. Earlier, the foreign minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, warned against a 'minimalist solution' that would reduce the European Union’s 'opportunity to have a clear voice in the world.'"  Olivier Ferrand, president of Terra Nova, a center-left research institute in France, said, “It is quite astounding. . . . It is jaw-dropping. It is the end of ambition for the E.U. — really disappointing.”

I think these are rather extreme positions on the selection of Herman Van Rompuy on November 19, 2009 as the first non-rotated president of the European Council.  Moreover, I don’t think the E.U. is going the way of the dinasaur just because Van Rompuy was not well known at the time of his selection.  He has written six books, is a writer of Japanese poems, has consensus-skills, and seems humble enough.  Would popular election have yielded a better candidate? As the election would have been E.U.-wide, it is doubtful that a high proportion of the voters would have been sufficiently familiar with him to make an informed decision. 

The New York Times continues, “The deal that produced the two choices emerged as a result of backroom negotiations among leaders jockeying for future and more important economic portfolios that could be more powerful in the enlarged European Union, which is still more of an economic union than a political one and looks to remain so.”  However, the E.U. includes a popularly-elected Parliament. Is a parliament not political? Is a parliament not a government body?  Perhaps, moreover, we should simply say that transfers of sovereignty are now economic in nature.

One might ask: who would have a vested interest in perpetrating such a subterfuge wherein governmental institutions, whether intergovernmental (e.g., the European Council) or national (e.g., the E.U. Parliament) are to be portrayed as solely economic in nature? According to The New York Times,  “The leaders of Europe’s most powerful countries, France and Germany, did not want to be overshadowed. Nor apparently did their foreign ministers.”   After the European Council elected Van Rompuy, Gordon Brown, the then-current British Prime Minister who had been pushing for Tony Blair (his precursor), told reporters that the posts are only ceremonial anyway since the state governments are still in control.  However, is Van Rompuy's role in presiding over the European Council merely for show? Is there not power in chairing a political institution? Furthermore, are the heads of the state governments in charge of the E.U. Commission, the E.U. Parliament, and the European Court of Justice? Even within the European Council where the governors of the states sit, qualified majority voting on most issues means that any given state government is not in control. We can conclude that E.U. level officials are not mere gloss on a window, and that the member states have indeed transferred some of their governmental sovereignty to the E.U. Government. Lest is be thought otherwise--that the E.U. does not have a government, there is a saying in English: If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, and swims like a duck, odds are it is a duck.  It might be useful to ask why it is in the interest of some that the obvious conclusion be withheld.

My only caveat concerning the selection of Van Rompuy is that the consensus maker was not the sort to make transparent the "duck" subterfuge and denial, which had gone unchecked at the expense of greater European integration. In other words, the E.U. needs its own leaders who can garnish attention for the E.U. itself (i.e., apart from its state governments) because if integration falters, the danger will be dissolution unless or until more governmental sovereignty is transferred to the E.U. As for Van Rompuy's low name recognition outside Belgium at the time of his selection, let’s not forget that few, if any, presidents of the U.S. Senate (the Vice President of the U.S.) have been known at the beginning of their respective terms. Of course, outside of breaking tie votes, the president of the U.S. Senate (whose members are the member states of the union) is more ceremonial than is the president of the European Council.  In fact, senators regularly stand in for the presiding officer when the U.S. Senate is in session, whereas Van Rompuy himself presides over sessions of the European Council.  Also, the European Council is possibly more powerful among E.U. governmental institutions than the U.S. Senate is in the U.S. This is probably so because the state governments in the E.U. have more power at the E.U. level than the American state governments do in the U.S. This could explain why Van Rompuy's position, the President of the European Council, is powerful (because the Council he chairs is powerful) even if Van Rompuy had been an unknown outside of Belgium and was not an attention-getter in the media (e.g., unlike Tony Blair).

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/world/europe/20union.html?_r=1&ref=world

The New York Times Sunday Magazine (11/29/09) ran a feature on Joe Biden as the Vice President of the United States.  Besides his experience and knowledge from having been a seasoned U.S. senator, Joe Biden is a man genuinely content in his own skin, and, it might be said, genuinely happy.  This, perhaps more than anything else, is vital to high level public official because sound judgment is important in those jobs. Ruling is not simply about how much one knows, or even how much experience one has; it is fundamentally about feeling at ease in who one is.  Ultimately, a positive vision springs from one’s state of mind and innate values.  One need only contrast Joe Biden with Richard Nixon, for example. Foreign policy comes up for both, but their tempraments could not be different.

My question is this: to what extent is our “Electoral College as popular election” geared to selecting the best candidate for president?  If the most popular is apt to be a people-pleaser, how comfortable is he (or she) likely to be in his (or her) own skin?  Furthermore, is the most popular necessarily seasoned with experience?  In short, if our current mechanism for selecting the president is oriented to privileging the flavor of the day, is this really the way we want to pick our presidents?    When we see a people-pleasing president cave to the business interests for support because popularity is not a sufficient basis of legitmacy, should we really be surprised?   What I see is a seasoned and knowledgeable vice president who is generally happy and getting along with people at the White House and in Congress, yet he did not do well at all in the popularity contests (i.e., the primaries).   I suggest that we have it backwards if we assume that Joe Biden is best as vice president because he did not fare well in the electoral contest.  As a case in point, he has been urging restraint in acquiescing to the pressure to add troops to Afganistan.  He wants a narrow focus, rather than a sensationalistic “surge.”  I suspect that he would stand up to big business and the military were he president because he wouldn’t need their approval to be content in his own skin.  Were he president, I suspect he wouldn’t need a second term.  Could that be said of a person who relishes popularity?

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/magazine/29Biden-t.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=joe%20biden&st=cse

In December, 2009, Abdullah II, King of the state of Jordon,dismissed the prime minister and replaced him with a palace aide and loyalist, dissolved Parliament and postponed legislative elections for a year.   For all the defects of a representative democratic system, it is far superior to autocratic rule, especially by one.   It is natural for people to resist preemption. “The nature of humans is they want democracy,” said Ali Dalain, an independent member of the Parliament that was dissolved. “One person cannot solve all problems and cannot make everyone happy, so people must share in determining their fate.”   These quotes are revealing from the standpoint of human nature and political theory.    In reading “one person cannot solve all problems,” I thought of the imperial US presidency—not only at the expense of the governments of the republics within the US, but also of the Congress.   The health-care insurance reform legislation, for example, is said to be Obama’s, even though he is in the executive rather than the legislative branch (having only a veto, which can be overridden, in the latter).   It would seem to me that the Speaker of the US House and the Majority Leader of the US Senate ought to have their own agendas—that the Congress should not simply be led by the president’s agenda.   Foreign policy is perhaps the one area where the Congress ought to defer—but only in terms of agreeing to consider what the president has negotiated abroad.  Had the UN climate talks in Copenhagen produced a treaty in December, 2009, the US President would have asked the US Senate to consider it.  Were the Senate to routinely ignore the President’s negotiations, it would be very difficult for the US to negotiate internationally.   In terms of foreign policy, however, one person does not hold a monopoly of wisdom or truth.  So in general, we could take a lesson from Jordon, even as we pride ourselves on our having a representative democracy rather than a monarchy.  I think perhaps we discount too readily the vestages of one-person rule in the US.  A unified long term vision is nice, but stepping back to see and enunciate it is different than deciding what it shall be and imposing it. 

In terms of the American presidency, there may even be a bit of hero or idol worship that has held on from ancient king-worship, as if eons of practice etched it in the human genome.  It is evinced not just when a president is sworn in, but also when he gives the State of the Union address—should I capitalize this?   Honor in the office, it is said, but the president is just a man.   The media obsesses on his every move, including what he is doing on vacation.  This obession gives us the illusion that we know the person.  Who is that behind the curtain anyway?   Do we really know, as we watch the screen? 

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/23/world/middleeast/23amman.html?ref=world

WASHINGTON - Republican leaders expressed renewed skepticism Tuesday about President Barack Obama’s call for a bipartisan forum on health care, raising questions about how much can be achieved at the televised event later this month. “This is a clever tactic by the president to try to put the Republicans on the defensive,” said John Feehery, a GOP consultant and former congressional aide. With the two sides at such odds, some Republican activists privately worry that their party’s leaders might be walking into a trap on Feb. 25 designed to portray their health care proposals as thin. The House’s top two Republican leaders openly questioned Obama’s sincerity and hinted they might skip the meeting if he uses the Democratic bills as the starting point for discussions.

Analysis: 

The problem may well be that President Obama is trying to have his cake and eat it too—meaning that he is trying to draw on the credibility of a head of state (i.e., a neutral party who is presiding) while at the same time being the captain of one of the partisan teams.  This is a structural conflict of interest that is centered in having the head of state also be the head of one of the contending political parties.  Even in how he characterizes what is not bipartisanship, his bias is palpable. “Being bipartisan cannot mean that Democrats give up everything they believe in, find the handful of things that Republicans have been advocating for, and we do those things, and then we have bipartisanship.”  To make such a statement literally from the presidential podium undercuts the presiding nature of the office.  To consistently side with one side in a house over which one is presiding undercuts one’s credibility to preside.  In presiding, one is looking out for the good of the whole, and coming down on one side or the other can legitimately only be done when the whole is in jeopardy.  Hence, Andrew Jackson came down against Congressional encroachment on the states in vetoing a Congressional appropriation for a road completely within Missouri’s borders; he feared the precedent would ruin the system of federalism (which must be balanced to be viable). Shortly thereafter, he sent the US Army down to South Carolina after it passed the Nullification Acts by which the South Carolina government claimed it could nullify any federal law that was not in the state’s interest.  Jackson’s involvement in taking sides was both for the states and the federal government because his only criterion was the long term viability of the Union.  To take sides on lesser matters tends to reduce one to an ideology, hence to one of the partisan groups.  This undercuts the credibility of the presiding officer for people in the other parties.  To “spend” that credibility for expedient purposes (an ideological agenda)—trying to get the most out of the power of the office—is to lose the kind of power that the office of the US Presidency was designed to have.  No wonder most occupants of the office have failed.  Barak Obama on health care is only the latest. Had Barak pushed the need for health-care reform without taking sides as the legislators debate possible plans, he would be treated as much more credible in hosting a meeting.  In other words, the seriousness of the conflict of interest can be gaged by the trepidation of the Republican leaders.  A partisan evoking the credibility of a figure head is inherently duplicitous and bound to lead to failure.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35313584/ns/politics-health_care_reform/

Secondary Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/us/politics/10obama.html?hpw

For Game Change, a non-fictional account of the 2008 US Presidential race, the two political reporters conducted hundreds of interviews and had unusually close access to the campaigns.  They perculate some pretty interesting political morsels. For example, on p.43, the authors write that Hillary Clinton considered Bill’s administration to have been ”a tactical and operational disaster.”  ouch! The book’s overall theme calls attention to the magnitude of the difference between the actual candidates and the images of them that they portrayed through the media.  In reading about what the candidates are like in person, I am particularly struck by their foul mouths and what this intimates concerning their characters.  That we, the voters, are not privy to the candidates’ real personalities, characters and values is of great concern to me because we are basing our decisions at least in part on fabricated image.  In short, we are situated too far removed to pull the lever to discover who is behind the curtain.  The public image can differ radically from the actual person. When Hillary was a US senator from NY, she portrayed herself as bipartisan and self-effacing in the Senate when in fact she was anything but (if the authors are correct).  On the evening of her win in New Hampshire, Hillary remarked privately, “I get really tough when people fuck with me” (p. 190).  Although her public persona comes off as rather stiff, I can’t imagine her using such language on a regular basis.  Referring to Obama to her aides after one of the debates, she said “What an asshole” (p. 145).  We would never know this from how chummy she would be with him as his Secretary of State.  Images can be deceiving.  As still another example, consider John Edwards, who said to Brumberger, one of his aides:  “Why didn’t you come to me like a fucking man and tell me to stop fucking her?” (p. 134).  On the republican side, McCain is “still prone to outbursts of profanity,” but we would never know it (p. 274).  On his first visit  to his campaign headquarters, for instance, he remarked, “Waht the fuck are all these people doing here? … I am not fucking authorizing these fucking hires. Who are these fucking Bush people? Where is the fucking money?” (p. 278).  It’s almost pathological with him, though the guy was a POW and therefore deserves a pass.  Still, it is remarkable how different his real personality is from his public one.  In public, he said, “I’m very happy with the campaign” (p. 285).  It is no wonder we don’t know who our politicans are.  My reaction from all the subterranean crassness is that I’m thankful that I’m not in the political arena with them; they don’t seem like the sort of folk that I would want to associate with. Evidently, they hire like-minded staff.  Harold Ickes of Hillary’s campaign, for example, says of Barak Obama after the Rev. Wright fiasco, “This guy has been sitting in the church for twenty fucking years. If you really want to take him down, let’s take him fucking down” (p. 238).  Quite a different articulation of politics and religion than we the public are used to.  I submit that Ickes’ association of church and “fucking” is revealing as to the man’s character. It is no wonder the real personalities are masked for you and me. There are implications for how our system of government is structured and for its electoral processes.  Even though we the voters can’t be blamed for going on fake images if that is all that is available to us, we are to blame for elongating the election season and expanding popular election in larger and larger electoral districts in which there is more distance between the average voter and the candidates.  The harder we make it to get elected, the more fighting-oriented the remaining applicants will be.  Is fighting prowess really the supervening quality in good governing?  Ironically, we would perhaps get better governance were it easier to get into office.   On the matter of the number of electors per candidate, the delegates in the Constitutional Convention warned that in very large electoral districts the people would not know their candidates as well. We could demand more of our intra-state representatives and less of those in the US Government; we have a better chance of person-to-person contact with the former than the latter, and the latter are too good at playing the image game…too fucking good.

See related article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35836844/ns/business-careers/

Watching the O’Reilly Factor on the evening of Obama’s health-care “summit,” I was struck by an exchange by Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingrahams.   Bill stated that Barak Obama had done an adequate job in moderating the discussion.  Laura replied, “He is not a moderator; he is the President of the United States. He has a majority in both houses (of Congress).”  Later in the program, Bill admitted that “moderating is not enough in the long-run because the country wants leadership.”

I believe that Laura’s statement evinces the main problem concerning modern presidents, who want the credibility needed to effectively moderate meetings involving partisans while at the same time the presidents remaining partisans themselves.  To be simplistic, this is a case of wanting both to have the cake and eat it too.  You can’t have both, and in fact the desire (and attempts) to do so are suggestive of a sort of character that might not be sufficiently respect-worthy to preside.  If the US President stands for the US as a whole, the office is oriented to staying above the frey unless the very viability of the Union is at issue.  This is not to be partisan.  In fact, it allows the President to preside over contending parties.  Perhaps Barak Obama would have been able to forge a compromise at his health-care summit had he been neutral concerning Democratic and Republican proposals.  That is to say, he might have been able to have enough sway with Republicans to police the meeting (i.e., of grandstanding speeches) and get both sides to give on particular things.  As it was, any such suggestions were dismissed as motivated by an ulterior motive rooted in the Democratic position.

In terms of Bill’s comment regarding leadership, the sort of leadership that the Union needs (even if we don’t realize it and want less) is that which places the good of the Union first regarding means as well as ends.  For instance, we need the sort of leadership that says “this problem needs to be solved this year.”  We already have partisan leadership from the Congressional (party) leadership.  The Majority and Minority Leaders in the US House and Senate are situated to give us the partisan leadership.  To load both types of leadership on the US President is to get the partisan sort rather than the presiding sort…hence we lose the latter when we could have both.

Take the State of the Union address.  It is supposed to be on the state of the US as a Union.  Yet it has degenerated into a partisan speech.  Justice Antonin Scalia once said he no longer goes to the annual speech because the justices “sit there like bumps on a log” in an otherwise highly partisan atmosphere.  After the 2010 speech, which contained partisan language critical of the court’s decision on corporate political contributions, Justice Roberts said that the justices might not attend the address in the future.

As a model to get back to, we might look back to George Washington, whose prior achievements and sageity of age gave him the stature with which to preside.  Hamilton and Jefferson and their allies in the Congressional leadership were able to take up the mantel of partisan leadership, with the President oriented to presiding over the new system of government and the Union itself.

So, yes, we do want leaderships—meaning partisan and systemic.  The former sort contaminates the latter.  It is for the latter that I believe the US Presidency was invented.  The Electoral College, for instance, was geared to buffering the popular demand for partisan leadership from infecting the presiding-officer role of the Presidency because the electors were to be once-removed from the passions of the people.  In subjecting the office to direct popular election, we have unwittingly lost the check safeguarding the presiding role.  Hence it is no accident that we have had some modern presidents who have been relatively unaccomplished (and younger) prior to their assuming the office.  Barak Obama does not have the prior accomplishments (and age-experience, or wisdom) by which he could be respected as a presider with sufficient credibility to get both parties to compromise in a meeting.  To be sure, he has the energy of relative youth to be zealously partisan, but this condition cuts him off from being able to effectively preside, or moderate, which in turn is particularly valuable when contending parties prefer to do battle than solve a problem that is in the Union’s interest to be solved.

I do wonder: who are the accomplished men and women of such stature that they could effectively preside?  Is a long election campaign the best way to find and test them?  Test them for what?  Does effectivelyness in vote-getting have anything to do with effectiveness in presiding?  This is not to say that accomplished stature would not attract votes.  Perhaps zealousness in vote-getting is a tacit admission that there is a dearth of stature that would naturally attract votes.  How much campaigning did George Washington have to do?  Very little, I would bet.  By virtue of his accomplished stature and self-discipline when it came to partisanship, he was able to effectively preside over the Constitutional Convention of 1786.  Lest this be viewed as a minor function relative to him pushing to get his way in every debate, consider that could be counted a minor miracle that the convention did not blow up or end in a stalemate.  There being a presider with stature, the convention could withstand the infighting.  In fact, Washington was such an effective presider that he could luxuriate on the final day with a request of his own…that the electorate of a US House seat be 20,000 rather than 30,ooo so the body would be that much more democratic (i.e., the representative being that much closer to the people…that much more knowable on an in-person basis).  The problem is that weighing in on virtually every debate has become the modus operendi of every US President, so their influence on each debate (and especially in presiding) has wanned.  Perhaps the occupants represent our culture of gimme, gimme, gimme, NOW! 

Perhaps we are not looking in the right places for accomplished stature that has the internal fortitude to resist such temptation.  Perhaps our means of selecting a President is oriented to the wrong type of person for the job.  In other words, if the job was designed one way and we expect it to operate contrariwise, this could explain why we witness so many presidents fail.  So I was not very surprised in watching two hours of the health-care “summit” that it was basically political theatre.  I was not surprised that Barak Obama had trouble in moderating the discussion towards achieving an agreement.  I was not surprised that the Republicans instinctively distrusted his moderator role.  In such a climate, Barak’s presiding was doomed to failure.  It really is not his fault, I don’t think, because we have virutally remade his office into something that is ill-suited to how it was designed.  Imagine trying to use your car to drive across a river.  Unless you are James Bond 007, your car probably wasn’t designed to travel through water.  To ignore its design and make it do it anyway shows a real lack of smarts and character.  I suspect that this is how the rest of the world sees us, yet we don’t see it in ourselves.  Ultimately, this is the problem.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35790685/ns/politics/

In the European singing contest/show in which Susan Boyle competed, she lost the top spot to a rap group of teenagers.  The general public could text in to vote.  The choice was not made by the three judges.  That one of the judges explicitly advocated for her after her final performance (just before the voting) was not sufficient to sway the majority of the votes cast by the public.  To be sure, there were non-music-related reasons to vote against her. For instance, the suggestive comments she made on stage just before her first performance, including, “I’m 48, and that’s not my other half” (accompanied by swinging her hips), were downright emetic, if not strange.  So it is possible that the voters put her personality above her excellent singing.  It is also possible that most of the callers (or most of votes, as people could text more than once) could have preferred rap music.

What I am getting to is this: a tension or outright contradiction can exist between meritocracy and democracy.  Plato and Aristotle both claim that there is a dark side to each system.  Meritocracy can slide into aristocracy and democracy into government by selfish and uninformed mob.  What struck me about the results of the singing contest was that the rap singing wasn’t good singing. The teenagers seemed to be playing around, their performance being more about dancing than singing.   It was not a dancing contest.  The voters could use any reason (or none) in deciding who to vote for.  Furthermore, it can be safely assumed that most voters were not experts on what makes good singing.  They were not trained to separate their own tastes from a critical perspective focusing on the voice.  The judges presumably could do that, but they were relegated to making their views known—views that the voters could ignore without any imprecation.
In a representative democracy, popular election is held to be the best political decision-making device regarding choosing representatives because the government is supposed to be for the people.  It is not that the people will necessarily make the best decisions, even where their own interest is concerned.  The US and EU relish popular election, yet both governmental systems contain safeguards, or checks, on it by having various lengths of terms and some officials appointed rather than elected.  Yet popular election is generally regarded as sacred in both Unions and in their respective states.    But not so fast.  This is not absolute.
In the case of Susan Boyle, a good case could be made that the three judges should have decided who won because they had greater expertise concerning singing.  Or take movies: I would wager that the Oscars, whose awards are determined by members (i.e., people who have expertise in the various fields of filmmaking), is more esteemed than are the People’s Choice Awards.  I would argue that the results of the Oscars are more credible and accurate because expertise is not chucked for a flavor of the month.  For instance, in the 2010 Oscars, Hurt Locker beat Avitar for Best Director and Best Picture.  Hurt Locker was largely an Indie (i.e., on the fringes) film, whereas Avitar broke box office records and was no doubt more popular with the general public.  The Academy members were able to weight improved 3D effects, story and direction without allowing the technical dazzle to overshadow the latter two, which are very important to an excellent picture.  The most popular film is not necessarily the best.  Of course, Academy voting is not perfect.  The 5000 plus membership may be sufficiently small that cronyism or, its opposite, grudges, may play a role.  Avitar’s Cameron is apparently not the most-liked man in Hollywood, but on the other hand so many techies worked on his movie that he had his own voting bloc.  I suspect that both of these were factors, but were not determinative.  I must admit that I saw a television clip a few months before the 2010 Oscars showing Cameron being very rude to a fan who simply wanted an autograph at LAX. So I was rooting for his ex-wife and her movie.  No selection process, or person for that matter, is perfect.

My point is that in watching Susan Boyle as well as the Oscars, I would not be surprised if there were not a general recognition in society that there are drawbacks to popular election, such that it is not necessarily the best method in every case (even in terms of selecting government officials).  I am not arguing for a society ruled by philsopher kings or judges, or, moreover, by an elite (even though I suspect this is already the case).  Rather, I am arguing that maybe we don’t esteem popular election as much as we think. Ignoring our reservations has caused problems in the past.

Most notably, we have eviscerated the check that was to have been made by the Electoral College in the selection of a US President.  A charismatic, though vastly inferior, candidate can be elected if he appeals to the passions of the moment being enjoyed by the general public.  We can’t even be sure that winner was elected on the basis of one of his positions.  For example, we can’t assume that Barak Obama was elected US President because he was advocating government subsidies on the uninsured (health).   The President of the EU is selected by a body comparable to what the US Senate was until 1913 (i.e., before its members were popularly elected).  When the first EU President was appointed (or elected) in 2009, some Europeans criticized the lack of democracy in the process.  “The people had no voice!” one person claimed.  Well, the people did have a voice because they elected all of the people who made the decision.  In fact, electing a state-level official is closer to the people because the electorate is smaller.   The cases of Susan Boyle losing at the European “Idol” show and Avitar losing at the Oscars suggests that having a buffer on a popular election is perhaps not a bad idea.  Too much democracy by popular election in a system of government has its downside.  To be sure, popular election does have value. It can be used to hold officials accountable when unelected officials would let them remain in office.

Perhaps a good solution would be  to look back at the Electoral College and understand why the Founders wanted a such a buffer.  It wasn’t until after the 1860s that in every state the people elected their respective state’s electors.  Andrew Jackson has urged that the people choose the US President back in 1828, and the contagion spread so much that the people of the American republics felt entitled to directly determine the President of the Union.   In 1913, a constitutional amendment was ratified whereby US Senators had to be directly elected by the people (at the cost of directly representing their state governments in the General Government). Today, the US Supreme Court is the only branch of the US Government not directly choosen by the American people. Originally, the US House was the only body in the US Government designed for popular election because it was supposed to reflect the immediate passions of the people (hence the short term of two years).   The US Senate was meant to be a buffer on the passions of the moment, as well as to protect the turf of the state governments against usurption by the General Government of the Union.  The US President was meant to protect the long-term viability of the Union (which hardly best served by polls).
It is perhaps no accident, kein Zufall, that the long-term viability of the Union gets short-changed for what is expedient—and that this game is now played mostly in Washington.  Blinded by the allure of popular election, we can’t have enough of it and we have adjusted our institutions accordingly.  Yet at the same time, we take the Oscars as the default and hardly pay attention to the People’s Choice Awards.  In short, we have one hell of a blindspot going on here.

So I suggest that we have annual elections for the US House (as had been suggested in the convention, but for the hardships of travel in 1786).  Further, as the appointment of US Senators was rift with corruption when the state governments did it, why not fashion the Senate on the example of the European Council?  The sitting governors themselves would periodically meet (regular summits, as they do represent semi-sovereign governments…just like the US Government itself is semi-sovereign).   That leaves the US President and the people’s entitlement.  A continent-wide election puts the candidates very far from their electors, which means a very imperfect selection (more of a popularity contest, actually).  We must bite the bullet and buffer ourselves from ourselves.  This is perhaps the hardest thing for the American people to do—we are really so arrogant concerning ourselves.  We think we can’t be wrong.  How squalid that is!  How ugly!   I would rather see Susan Boyle fully displayed in Playboy than gaze upon this attitude.  Yes, I am a native (American)—no, not an Indian. I was born and bread in the heartland, yet I can smell the air and look around me—the human pollution being palpable.   Concerning selecting a President for the Union, the trouble in creating a buffer from excessive democracy is in avoiding corruption.  I was going to suggest having both the state governments vote in one body and the people in another and where the same candidate is not chosen through the election to the US House (each state having one vote).  But this is too complicated.   As we are  Union of States and the latter have been marginalized, perhaps the US President ought to be selected by the state governments.   Perhaps the governors could nominate a candidate and the senates confirm.  The states’ executives would begin the process whereby the Union’s executive is selected, and the confirmation would be a check against corruption between a candidate and a governor.   It would give the people an added reason to pay attention to their senate races. That the people elect their governor and state senators means there would be a link to democracy.   Contrary to a continental popular election, the governors and even the state senators could have a greater opportunity to meet the candidates and thus make a better judgment, at least in removing any real losers whose marketing could nonetheless say the people.   Considering that some candidates come out of nowhere, getting to know them is important.  Consider Carter in 1976 (virtually unknown nationwide before the primaries), or Obama in 2008.  It is risky to elect people we have just met on the basis of televised debates and commercials.

If we ignore the problem of excess democracy in the presumption that we can’t be wrong, we will risk repeating on a grander scale the sort of election outcome that went against Susan Boyle.   She may not be the best looking woman, but is that really relevant to listening to her voice?  The most votes is not necessarily indicative of the best.  Ironically, in proffering an alternative that moderates the popular election element, I am asking us to rise to our best.

For the drawbacks in the Oscars voting, pls see: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1970502-1,00.html

In a NYT article, the results of a focus group of independent American voters are described. These voters did not hate politicians. They simply saw both parties, along with the media and big business, as symptoms of a larger societal ailment. The dominant theme of the focus group’s discussion, in which jobs and taxes came up only in passing, was the larger breakdown of civil society — the disappearance of common courtesy, the relentless stream of data from digital devices, the proliferation of lawsuits and the insidious influence of media on their children. For instance, a man complained about drivers who had grown increasingly hostile and inconsiderate on the roads, which drew nods of assent all around. The members of the focus group believed that politicians in Washington conduct themselves just as childishly and with the same lack of accountability as kids throwing chicken casserole in a school lunchroom.

While the results of this focus group may explain why Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both suffered party losses in their mid-term elections, what is left unexplained is why 98% of members of Congress are re-elected on average.  However, the results can explain why so many U.S. Presidents become unpopular during their term.  The obvious answer is that governing involves making choices that inevitably piss off one side, and these sides add up.  Yet there may be a deeper reason: the Presidents may not understand the nature of the office. Modern presidents win elections by promising to reform Washington, to make it more ennobling and more responsive to Americans overwhelmed by the speed of change. But once they are elected, they find themselves sucked into the capital’s partisan culture, caught up in familiar debates while the people who supported them struggle with a growing sense of chaos. For example, Bill Clinton’s rhetorical emphasis on personal responsibility resonated with many independent voters. However, once in office, Clinton immediately found himself pulled into polarizing debates (gays in the military, “Hillarycare,” and so on). The same thing ultimately happened to George W. Bush, who promised a return to civility and core values and ended up running a White House in which every issue, from wars to welfare, was heavily politicized. We can contrast these examples with the understanding of  earlier Presidents who understood their office as standing for the nation and protecting its system of governance, rather than as being primarily oriented to partisanship while governing. Washington, for example, had both Thomas Jefferson and James Hamilton in his cabinet.  The President presided, acting in what he thought to be the best interests of the United States and their general government. Being partisan in office undercuts the presiding role, and thus the credibility of the President.  The results of the focus group indicate that Americans want a President who resists the temptation to engage in partisan fighting in order to stand for things on which most of us agree, such as that American society should be more civil. The modern presidency is simply too cluttered—too busy on the little things at the expense of looking out for the viability of the common good.  Joe Hagin, George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, observed there “was much less time [under the second Bush] to catch your breath during the day.” A constant juggling of issues—from wars to the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, often all at the same time, exhausted the White House staff. “There’s only so much bandwidth in the organization,” Hagin avers.  He further asks, “Can any single person fully meet the demands of the 21st century presidency?”  Doris Goodwin claims the growth in the number of things expected of the president has expanded expodentially since WWII. “The President’s inner circle can become stretched by the constant number of things labeled ‘crises’ that land on his desk.” Surely, the Presidency was not designed to micromanage every issue that hits the political radar screen. The proliferation of news sources has increased the pressure on the President to weigh in on more things.  President Obama delivered 57 speeches in October, 2010, alone; he had seven speechwriters at the time. Hagin notes that in the case of George W’s Presidency, struggles “over education and agriculture that had mired [his] first year in office were replaced with just one big expectation: to keep America safe.” Although occasioned by an attack and resulting in an expansion of bureaucracy in national security, this prioritizing to keeping America safe dovetails, I contend, with the nature of the office. Hagin advocates a power-shift from the White House staff to the cabinet agencies, but this would sidestep the possibility that we have been trying to fit the oval office into a square peg.  That is, the modern Presidency may well be thought of in ways contrary to how the office was designed, and thus in ways ill-suited to its nature.  The key may well be to get back to the meaning of “to preside.”  Literally, this means to sit before or in front of (from the Latin). In effect, we have cluttered it at its own expense. On June 2 in the constitutional convention, Ben Franklin referred to the proposed office as sitting “in peaceful Council … merely to preside over our civil concerns, and [to] see that our laws are duly executed.” (Madison, Notes, p. 55) Governeur Morris stated on July 19 that the President should be “a firm guardian of the people and of the public interest.” (Madison, Notes, p. 324) The office of the U.S. President is thus geared to looking over the viability of the whole, leaving the partisanship and legislating to the legislative branch. Partisanship, which is to say, taking sides on virtually every controversy that is taken up by the Congress, detracts from the credibility that the President would need to preside over the whole (as well as to see that the laws passed are executed with due process). Presiding here means standing before. It implies acting in the long-term interests of the whole rather than being partisan and oriented to every issue that comes up on the media’s radar screens.  Looking to the viability of the American economy and the US Government, a President would utilize the veto only when legislation could be expected to destroy the United States. This would involve resisting the slippery slope wherein every Congressional debate invokes the very survival of the union.

In short, a President acting in line with the office would have his or her eye on the big picture rather than getting into arguments with the leaders of the other party over every policy that is being debated in Congress. By doing less, such a President will have done more because what he or she will have done would be more in sync with the office of President. Having resisted immediate political or ideological gain from partisanship, such a President would have more credibility throughout his or her term of office.

Sources:
Daniel Stone, “Hail to the Chiefs,” Newsweek, November 22, 2010, pp. 30-33.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/us/politics/07bai.html
James Madison, Notes in the Federal Convention of 1787. New York: Norton, 1987.

In the U.S. Constitutional Convention, Governeur Morris said on July 2, 1787, that the “Rich will strive to establish their dominion & enslave the rest. They always did. They always will. The proper security [against] them is to form them into a separate interest.” (Madison, p. 233) By this he meant the U.S. Senate. The democratic principle in the U.S. House and the aristocratic spirit in the U.S. Senate “will then controul each other.” (Madison, p. 233) Having the State Legislatures appoint their U.S. Senators—as was the case until 1913—would defeat the independence of the Senate, and hence its function as a check on the excesses of democracy in the U.S. House.  Such excesses had just been evinced in Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts, wherein the legislature there had sided with the former soldiers who had not been paid for their service but were still to make payments on their debts.

In other words, one of the purposes of the U.S. Senate as originally envisioned was to protect property (including creditor interests). The assumption was that the representative democracy of the U.S. House would favor the lower classes.  Although the amounts spent on Senatorial campaigns in the early twenty-first century practially guarantee that the seats would defend the interests of the rich, that the Senators are elected by citizens rather than appointed by State governments must compromise the U.S. Senate as a check on the democratic excesses in the U.S. House. Even as this check has been enervated, the protection of wealth function endures.  Indeed, given Shaws’ Rebellion the check on excess democracy is really just the protection of property, which is practially guaranteed anyway by the amounts needed to run for the U.S. Senate.  Not surprisingly, in 2010 the medium wealth of a U.S. Senator was roughly $2.8 million. It is worth quoting from Governeur Morris again—this time from July 19 in Convention. “Wealth tends to corrupt the mind & to nourish its lvoe of power, and to stimulate it to oppression.” (Madison, p. 323)  As the number of electors per member of the U.S. House has increased, even that body could be said to evince a moneyed aristocracy.  The question may thus be raised: Is there a sufficient check against the rich in the national legislature?

Governeur Morris claimed in convention that the U.S. President “should be the guardian of the people, even of the lower classes” on account of the wealth-interest in the U.S. Senate. (Madison, p. 322). However, if the wealth interest has gained a foothold in the U.S. House and even in the presidency itself, that check may well be insufficient and nugatory. A return of domestic functions of government to those of the respective States could perhaps evince a greater weight for what Morris calls “the Mass of the people.” (Madison, p. 323)  At the very least, the lower houses of the State governments are not dominated by the rich. This was precisely what the delegates of the convention wanted to check, and the creation of a general government was their solution. It is no wonder that it has become top-heavy both at the expense of federalism and the poor.

Source: James Madison, Notes in the Federal Convention of 1787. New York: Norton, 1987

For general information on the U.S. Constitutional Convention, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_Convention_(United_States)